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United States society collectively calibrates at 421, and the figure carries a date: as of November 2007. Not roughly 400. Not “the high 400s.” Four hundred and twenty-one, in a specified month. By the time that sentence arrives, some two hundred pages into The Map of Consciousness Explained, the reader has been told more than once that numbers like this pass judgment on no one.
The Map is David R. Hawkins’s chart of human consciousness, a logarithmic scale running from 1 to 1,000 with Shame at 20, Courage at 200, Love at 500, and full Enlightenment at the summit. This 2020 volume is a posthumous primer, assembled by Fran Grace out of Hawkins’s books, lectures and recorded conversations, with a preface by his widow Susan. The figures come from muscle testing: a tester presses down on an outstretched arm, the arm holds firm against truth and drops against falsehood, and a level is bracketed by putting yes-or-no questions to the body. Hawkins calibrated everything this way — teachers, scriptures, ideologies, animals, films, prime ministers.
Set aside for a moment whether an arm can do that. The book’s own difficulty is nearer to hand. Hawkins writes that “The number is not a judgment or a moral statement; it simply indicates the gradient of whatever is being measured.” He restates this in every register the book has. A thermometer, a barometer, an altimeter, a light meter. A step-down transformer. A household where a refrigerator is not better than a nightlight. Appendix B, immediately before laying out its ranked tables of saints and scriptures, says flatly that 970 is not better than 610, and reaches for golf clubs: you choose a putter or a driver by the shot in front of you, not by which club is superior.
The analogies keep arriving because the claim keeps failing.
An altimeter tells a pilot nothing about where to fly; the runway and the weather do that. The Map does the opposite. It is the entire reason to move, and it points one way. Eighty-five per cent of humanity sits below 200, which the book says accounts for the suffering on the planet. One person at Love counterbalances 750,000 below the line. Susan Hawkins ends her preface with her husband’s instruction — straight and narrow is the path, waste no time. Nobody is urged up a ladder whose rungs are all of equal height. And the disclaimer has to be there, because the Map’s most persistent enemy, by the book’s own account, is the student who turns up announcing they’re in the 500s. The only available defence against that vanity is to deny that the scale ranks. Which is the one thing a scale of this kind cannot stop doing.
Hawkins believed the equality claim. It came out of a collapse in 1965 that he describes as total: the personal self extinguished, every face equally radiant, all things holy by virtue of existing. That is a report, not a debating position, and it deserves to be read as one. The clinical vignette that opens Part I still has weight, too. A woman arrives at his office carrying 56 bottles of supplements in paper bags, won’t sit in the chair, wants her prescription torn from the untouched middle of the pad, and is eventually treated by telephone because the journey frightens her. Hawkins stayed with her for years, and by his own account, “the only thing I ever did was to love her.” Nothing in that story needs a number. It may be the best thing in the book, and the Map contributes nothing to it except a caption.
The trouble surfaces where the numbers do work the prose could not. Peace vigils calibrate at 305; peace demonstrations at 170. Free speech as a concept, 340; free speech as Americans practise it, 187, the level of narcissism. A “Question Authority” bumper sticker is hostile at 160. Scepticism, 160. Negative studies of muscle testing come in at 160, and so do the investigators who ran them. Crick’s DNA work calibrated at 440; his later attempt to reduce consciousness to neuronal activity, 135. These are not gradients. No quantity exists here of which they could be gradients — the Map’s columns are headed emotion, view of self, view of God, view of life. They are judgments with decimals fastened to them, and the decimals are doing the arguing, because a number closes a conversation in a way an opinion never can.
Napoleon’s level was 450 while he was a tactician and a mathematician; the instant he crowned himself rather than let the Pope do it, he dropped to 175. I keep going back to that one, partly because it’s a marvellous story and partly because I can’t find the place where a measurement could have occurred. What it sounds like is a historian’s verdict on vanity, converted into an instrument reading two centuries after the fact, and thereby made unanswerable.
Which leads to the line in Appendix B I can’t get past. After the tables of teachers and writings, sorted into the 600s, the 700s, the 850-plus: “Simply reading the lists gives assurance that one is headed in the right direction.” Not the practice, not the surrender, not the small kindness to the tired woman at the checkout that Susan Hawkins describes so well in her preface. Reading the ranking. That is the Map at its most candid about what it supplies — the reassurance of knowing where one stands, offered by a chart that has spent nine chapters insisting there is nowhere to stand.
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